Anthony Perkins's Wife Tells of 2 Years of Secrecy

By BERNARD WEINRAUB,

Published: September 16, 1992

HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 15—
For two years Anthony Perkins and his wife, Berry Berenson, kept silent that the actor was dying of AIDS. "He simply never wanted anyone to know," Ms. Berenson said in an interview at their home today. "He figured if anyone knew they'd never give him work again."

Three days after the death of her husband, who was the the star of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and many other films, Ms. Berenson sat this morning in her home and quietly discussed his life, her devastated marriage and the singular problem of facing AIDS in Hollywood.

"He went twice to stay at the hospital, and once as an out-patient, and we went under another name," she recalled. "I literally asked myself, Who am I today? It was weird. You lose all sense of reality. You can't even be yourself in a situation like this. You're signing 'Mrs. Smith' or whatever. You think that this man has spent his entire life giving people so much pleasure in show business, and this is his reward. He can't even be himself at the end. I mean, people at the Screen Actors Guild are completely into this thing. They're used to dealing with aliases."

Mr. Perkins, who was 60 years old, died at his rustic home nestled in the Hollywood hills on Saturday, surrounded by his family: Ms. Berenson, their 18-year-old son, Osgood, a college student at the University of Southern California, and Elvis, 16, a high school student at a private school. Only the family and a remarkably few number of friends knew he had AIDS. Conference With Sons

Mr. Perkins, in his final days, spoke to his sons about issuing a note upon his death, and the boys wrote down their father's words. "I chose not to go public about this, because to misquote 'Casablanca,' I'm not much at being noble, but it doesn't take too much to see that the problems of an old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy old world."

Mr. Perkins said he learned "more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life."

Ms. Berenson, who married Mr. Perkins in 1973, said she was surprised at the ferocity of his comments about show business. Although his illness engulfed him, Ms. Berenson said that her husband was angry because he had spent long stretches of time without working, even before he became ill, and his career was almost totally overwhelmed by his portrayal of the lunatic Norman Bates in "Psycho."

"At one point he went two years without working, but he was such a stoic he never talked about it," she recalled. "He never complained. He learned to play the piano. He made phone calls. He would sit by the phone and wait for the agents to call. He had such mixed feeling about Norman Bates. On the one hand he began thinking that others in the industry saw him as that character, strange and weird. And on the other hand it was a burden. It was very limiting to his career."

One of his last roles was in an NBC television drama, "In the Deep Woods," in which he plays a police detective. The movie is scheduled to be broadcast next month.

Ms. Berenson said: "Most of our friends didn't know because Tony didn't want them to know. Now people say, 'Oh, if only I had known I'd have given him work.' I'm not sure I buy that."

Asked how she thought her husband had contracted AIDS, Mr. Berenson shook her head and said haltingly: "No. We don't really know. No. It's not worth it."

Ms. Berenson, a friendly and outgoing woman who is a photographer, is a granddaughter of the Paris fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and a grandniece of the art dealer and historian Bernard Berenson. She is now being visited by her sister, Marisa Berenson, the actress, who flew in from her home in Paris, and her mother, Marquesa Gogo Cacciapuoti, also from Paris.

In her comfortable home, the phone rings constantly, and friends arrive bringing elaborate trays of food for visitors who will pour in throughout the day. A list of stars and directors who have called rests near a sofa. The director Mike Nichols, a family friend, has asked about arranging a public service for Mr. Perkins's colleagues in the movies. A private ceremony will be held in the Perkins home sometime in the next few days for close friends. How AIDS Was Found

In the interview, Ms. Berenson said she did not want to criticize Hollywood harshly, as the actor Brad Davis did when he died of AIDS last year. He said he hid the disease out of fear that no one would hire him. Despite the fact that many homosexuals work in film, the entertainment world has until recently been slow to support AIDS programs, with the exception of some stars, like Elizabeth Taylor.

"Wen Tony heard about Brad Davis, I'm sure he was concerned," Ms. Berenson said. "I knew Brad well. We were in acting school together. It broke my heart that he wasn't able to share it, this poor guy, and maybe he was right. Maybe they wouldn't have given him work."

Mr. Perkins was tested for AIDS after an article in The Enquirer, a tabloid newspaper, said he was HIV positive. Ms. Berenson said her husband had not been tested for AIDS but had been given a series of blood tests in Los Angeles for a palsy on the side of his face. Ms. Berenson said she assumed that someone had tested her husband's blood for the virus and leaked the results to the tabloid. After the story appeared, he was tested and found to be HIV positive.

"I was devastated; I couldn't believe it," she said. "And then I immediately thought, what about me? What about my children? I got tested. I got tested four times in the last two years. And I'm fine. And I don't understand, I don't understand any of this. I don't understand this disease at all." Telling a Few Friends

Because her husband was such a private person, she said, and because he had grown deeply depressed, he wanted to tell as few people as possible about the illness. Ms. Berenson agreed, but after she gave him a surprise 60th birthday on April 4, and friends said he looked gaunt, she pleaded with him to allow her to tell close friends.

"I said to him, Look, I'm going to share this with a few close friends that I trust because otherwise I'm going to go crazy," she recalled. "I'm not that good an actress. I told Tony I can't play this charade. I just can't. He would be fine about me telling one or two people, but then he'd say, 'Oh, you're telling too many.' "

Ms. Berenson said that since her husband was well known, tabloids haunted them. "They were horrendous, following my housekeeper to her home or the supermarket," she said. "They haunted us like vultures."

Ms. Berenson said she was uncertain about what she would do next. Her eyes glistened when she talked of their homes, which her husband adored: a small house in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, where he was "treated like a private person," and their Hollywood home. "He could spend days and days alone in this house, never want to get out, just putter around. He loved it," she said. "Toward the end he was tired and depressed. He didn't want anybody to see him. He couldn't stand up. A friend or two would come and he would say, 'I'm ready to go," and they would say, 'It's O.K., why don't you?' But he was just holding on, holding on for the boys and me."

Photo: Berry Berenson yesterday on the porch of the Los Angeles home she shared with her husband, Anthony Perkins. (Ted Soqui for The New York Times)